1. Be able to describe and to analyze the reasons for and the results of
reform in the Ottoman Empire.

2. Understand the external and internal challenges that weakened the Qing
Empire in the nineteenth century.

3. Be able to explain how the Russian Empire maintained its status as both
a European Power and a Great Asian land empire.

4. Be able to compare and to offer explanations for the differences and
similarities between the Ottoman, the Qing, and the Russian Empires in the
nineteenth century.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

I. The Ottoman Empire

A. Egypt and the Napoleonic Example, 1798–1840

1. In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt and defeated the Mamluk forces he
encountered there. Fifteen months later, after a series of military
defeats, Napoleon returned to France, seized power, and made himself
emperor.

2. His generals had little hope of holding on to power and, in 1801,
agreed to withdraw. Muhammad Ali emerged as the victor in the ensuing
power struggle.

3. Muhammad Ali used many French practices in effort to build up the
new Egyptian state.

4. He established schools to train modern military officers and built
factories to supply his new army.

5. In the 1830s his son Ibrahim invaded Syria and started a similar
set of reforms there.

6. European military pressure forced Muhammad Ali to withdraw in 1841
to the present day borders of Egypt and Israel.

7. Muhammad Ali remained Egypt's ruler until 1849 and his family held
onto power until 1952.

B. Ottoman Reform and the European Model, 1807-1853

1. At the end of the eighteenth century Sultan Selim III introduced
reforms to strengthen the military and the central government and to
standardize taxation and land tenure. These reforms aroused the
opposition of Janissaries, noblemen, and the ulama.

2. Tension between the Sultanate and the Janissaries sparked a
Janissary revolt in Serbia in 1805. Serbian peasants helped to defeat
the Janissary uprising and went on to make Serbia independent of the
Ottoman Empire.

3. Selim suspended his reform program in 1806, too late to prevent a
massive military uprising in Istanbul in which Selim was captured and
executed before reform forces could retake the capital.

4. The Greeks gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1829.
Britain, France, and Russia assisted the Greeks in their struggle for
independence and regarded the Greek victory as a triumph of European
civilization.

5. Sultan Mahmud II believed that the loss of Greece indicated a
profound weakness in Ottoman military and financial organization. Mahmud
used popular outrage over the loss of Greece to justify a series of
reforms that included the creation of a new army corps, elimination of
the Janissaries, and reduction of the political power of the religious
elite. Mahmud’s secularizing reform program was further articulated in
the Tanzimat (restructuring) reforms initiated by his successor Abdul
Mejid in 1839.

6. Military cadets were sent to France and Germany for training, and
reform of Ottoman military education became the model for general
educational reforms in which foreign subjects were taught, foreign
instructors were employed, and French became the preferred language in
all advanced scientific and professional training.

7. Educational reform stimulated growth of the wealth and influence
of urban elites. The reforms also brought about unexpected cultural and
social effects that ranged from the introduction of European clothing
styles to the equal access to the courts for all male subjects to
equalization of taxation.

8. The public rights and political participation granted during the
Tanzimat were explicitly restricted to men. The reforms decreased the
influence of women, while at the same time the development of a cash
economy and competitive labor market drove women from the work force.

C. The Crimean War and its Aftermath, 1853–1856

1. Russia’s southward expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire
led to the Crimean War. An alliance of Britain, France and the Ottoman
Empire defeated Russia and thus blocked Russian expansion into Eastern
Europe and the Middle East.

2. The Crimean War brought significant changes to all combatants. The
Russian government was further discredited and forced into making
further reforms, Britain and France carried out extensive propaganda
campaigns that emphasized their roles in the war, and the French press
promoted a sense of unity between Turkish and French society.

3. The Crimean War marked the transition from traditional to modern
warfare. The percussion caps and breech-loading rifles that were used in
the Crimean War were the beginning of a series of subsequent changes in
military technology that included the invention of machine guns, the use
of railways to transfer weapons and men, and trench warfare.

4. After the Crimean War the Ottoman Empire continued to establish
secular financial and commercial institutions on the European model.
These reforms contributed to a shift of population from rural to urban
areas and the development of professional and wage laborer classes, but
they did not solve the regime’s fiscal problems.

5. Problems associated with the reforms included the Ottoman state’s
dependence on foreign loans, a trade deficit, and inflation. In the
1860s and 1870s discussion of a law that would have permitted all men to
vote left Muslims worried that the Ottoman Empire was no longer a Muslim
society. This worry may have contributed to Muslim hostilities against
Christians in the Ottoman territories in Europe, Armenia, and the Middle
East.

6. The decline of Ottoman power and wealth inspired a group of
educated urban men known as the Young Ottomans to band together to work
for constitutionalism, liberal reform, and the creation of a Turkish
national state in place of the Ottoman Empire. A constitution was
granted in 1876, but a coup soon placed a more conservative ruler on the
throne; the Ottoman Empire thus continued its weakened existence under
the sponsorship of the Western powers until 1922.

II. The Russian Empire

A. Russia and Europe

1. In 1700, only three percent of the Russian population lived in
cities and Russia was slow to acquire a modern infrastructure and modern
forms of transportation.

5. The diplomatic inclusion of Russia among the great powers of
Europe was counterbalanced by a powerful sense of Russophobia in the
west.

B. Russia and Asia

1. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire had
reached the Pacific Ocean and the borders of China. In the nineteenth
century, Russian expansion continued to the South, bringing Russia into
conflict with China, Japan, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire.

2. Britain took steps to halt Russian expansion before Russia gained
control of all of Central Asia.

C. Cultural Trends

1. Russia had had cultural contact with Europe since the late
seventeenth century.

2. The reforms of Alexander I promised more on paper than they
delivered in practice.

3. Opposition to reform came from wealthy families that feared reform
would bring about imperial despotism, a fear that was realized during
the reign of Nicholas I.

4. The Decemberist revolt was carried out by a group of reform-minded
military officers upon the death of Alexander I. Their defeat amounted
to the defeat of reform for the next three decades.

5. Heavy penalties were imposed on Russia in the treaty that ended
the Crimean War. The new tsar, Alexander II, was called upon to
institute major reforms.

6. Under Alexander II, reforms and cultural trends begun under his
grandfather were encouraged and expanded.

7. The nineteenth century saw numerous Russian scholarly and
scientific achievements, as well as the emergence of significant Russian
writers and thinkers.

III. The Qing Empire

A. Economic and Social Disorder, 1800–1839

1. When the Qing conquered China in the 1600s they restored peace and
stability and promoted the recovery and expansion of the agricultural
economy, thus laying the foundation for the doubling of the Chinese
population between 1650 and 1800. By 1800, population pressure was
causing environmental damage and contributing to an increasing number of
itinerant farmhands, laborers, and merchants.

2. There were a number of sources of discontent in Qing China.
Various minority peoples had been driven off their land, and many people
regarded the government as being weak, corrupt, and perhaps in collusion
with the foreign merchants and missionaries in Canton and Macao.
Discontent was manifest in a series of internal rebellions in the
nineteenth century, beginning with the White Lotus rebellion
(1794–1804).

B. The Opium War and Its Aftermath, 1839–1850

1. Believing the Europeans to be a remote and relatively unimportant
people, the Qing did not at first pay much attention to trade issues or
to the growth in the opium trade. In 1939, when the Qing government
realized the harm being done by the opium trade, they decided to ban the
use and import of opium and sent Lin Zexu to Canton to deal with the
matter.

2. The attempt to ban the opium trade led to the Opium War
(1839–1842), in which the better-armed British naval and ground forces
defeated the Qing and forced them to sign the Treaty of Nanking. The
Treaty of Nanking and subsequent treaties signed between the Qing and
the various Western powers gave Westerners special privileges and
resulted in the colonization of small pockets of Qing territory.

C. The Taiping Rebellion, 1850–1864

1. The Taiping Rebellion broke out in Guangxi province, where poor
farmland, endemic poverty, and economic distress were complicated by
ethnic divisions that relegated the minority Hakka people to the
lowliest trades.

2. The founder of the Taiping movement was Hong Xiuquan, a man of
Hakka background who became familiar with the teachings of Christian
missionaries in Canton. Hong declared himself to be the younger brother
of Jesus and founded a religious group (the "Heavenly Kingdom of Great
Peace" or "Taiping" movement) to which he recruited followers from among
the Hakka people.

3. The Taiping forces defeated imperial troops in Guangxi, recruited
(or forced) villagers into their segregated male and female battalions
and work teams, and moved toward eastern and northern China. In 1853 the
Taiping forces captured Nanjing and made it the capital of their
"Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace."

4. The Qing were finally able to defeat the Taiping with help from
military forces organized by provincial governors like Zeng Guofan and
with the assistance of British and French forces.

5. The Taiping Rebellion was one of the world’s bloodiest civil wars
and the greatest armed conflict before the twentieth century. The
results of the Taiping Rebellion included 20 to 30 million deaths,
depopulation and destruction of rich agricultural lands in central and
eastern China, and suffering and destruction in the cities and cultural
centers of eastern China.

D. Decentralization at the End of the Qing Empire, 1864 – 1875

1. After the 1850s the expenses of wars and the burden of indemnities
payable to Western governments made it impossible for the Qing to get
out of debt. With the Qing government so deeply in their debt, Britain
and France became active participants in the period of recovery known as
the Tongzhi Restoration that followed the Taiping Rebellion.

2. The real work of recovery was managed by provincial governors like
Zeng Guofan, who looked to the United States as his model and worked to
restore agriculture and to reform the military and industrialize
armaments manufacture. The reform programs were supported by a coalition
of Qing aristocrats including the Empress Dowager Cixi, but they were
unable to prevent the Qing Empire from disintegrating into a set of
large power zones in which provincial governors exercised real
authority.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why were the Ottoman and the Qing Empires vulnerable to Western pressure
in the nineteenth century?

2. How did the Ottoman and the Qing Empires’ previous relations with Europe
affect the ways in which they responded to their problems in the nineteenth
century?

3. What roles did internal factors such as economic conditions and
political structure play in the unfolding of events in the Ottoman and Qing
Empires and in the nineteenth century?

4. In what ways did the Russian and Ottoman Empires resemble each other?
How did Russia differ from the autocratic kingdoms of Europe with which it
aligned itself?

5. In what ways did advances in technology help to define relations between
the West and the Ottoman and Qing Empires in the nineteenth century?

6. How did most European statesmen see Russia in the nineteenth century?
Did they see it as a fellow European power?